I briefly watched "Monitor" last night (July 21, 2005). Monitor is a "60 minutes" equivalent on German public tv, produced by the looniest of loony left journalists in the country.

Apologies - I just called them "journalists". They aren't "journalists" in any traditional sense. They are activists, pushing their anti-American agenda for the advantage of whoever shares their lunatic convictions, including islamic terrorists followers of religious groups with an understandable and forgivable tendency towards physically supported political activities.

Highlight of last nights presentation was a segment called "US-Stützpunkte in Deutschland: Drehscheibe für Folterflüge?" ("US military bases in Germany - turntable for torture flights?"). Don't expect me to go into details of this disgusting piece of trash journalism. Of course, "torture" referred - this is the default mode in the German media - to the alleged misdeeds of the great American devil. Islamic terrorists were presented as victims, not as villains. Nothing new here, really.

Just by coincidence on the same day I found this remarkable quote from Glen Reynolds, addressing a particularly stupid question by a British journalist in a press conference of Tony Blair and Australian Prime Minister John Howard:

Some idiot correspondent asked Blair if the attacks were his fault because of the Iraq war. And others are taking an equally negative line -- one asks if the propaganda war against terror is being lost.

No -- but if so, it's because of people in the media like these. John Howard's too polite to tell them to read Norm Geras, but he put them in their place with logic, noting that Bin Laden was unhappy about the liberation of East Timor and declared war on that basis long before the Iraq invasion.

Translation: You're idiots, cowards, and political hacks. Yes! The preening, point-scoring irresponsibility of the press, which is if anything worse in Britain than in America, is one of the most striking things about this war, and it will be decades before it recovers. If it does.

"You're idiots, cowards, and political hacks."

Can someone come up with a better definition for Monitor's activists? I doubt it.